Music

In response to the incredible creativity arising from the Indigenous community, we’ve created RPM Records: a new label to spotlight innovative, new, and emerging Indigenous artists and music. We are excited to bring you Ziibiwan’s Time Limits EP as our first official release.

Ziibiwan is a multi-talented Anishinaabe experimental-electronic artist and producer from Toronto, Ontario. After catching some of his early tracks on SoundCloud and a few clandestine EP drops in the past year, we were captivated by his lush, atmospheric, and otherworldly sound.

He began playing guitar and piano as a younger teenager, before getting into audio production work and electronic composition, and, though his style flows through genre, you can hear echoes of contemporary R&B, hip-hop aesthetics, and the harmonic range of Radiohead and Björk filtered through his evolving production styles.

Ziibiwan’s new EP, Time Limits, takes his previous work and elevates it into another orbit. The EP is a rift in the sonic-cosmic flow, an expansive vision of cyclical temporalities and inner explorations rooted in Indigenous consciousness.

Time Limits is both an introduction to the world that he inhabits and an invocation of the city that formed the album. Pulling stems from late night moods and explorations, Toronto’s urban enclosures and dark vibes can be heard throughout the record’s interwoven drums, synths, and atmospherics.

From the ambient unfolding of tracks like “North” and “Fast Asleep” to the more beat-based flows of “Loon Song” and “Manitou,” Ziibiwan’s ethereal, sonic landscape opens into deeply hypnotic spaces where land, sky, and deep sea meet.

Ziibiwan calls the album “a sonic document of survival and resistance from a millennial-born Indigenous person. A survival of the wounded mind – the state of fear and panic attacks, the depression: a mixture of inter-generational effects and the fears of the human condition.”

“The title comes from the idea that everything has a beginning and end in this world,” he says. “I was always afraid of that. While making the album, I found beauty in that and a need to celebrate life, something our ancestors did often through ceremony. There is an Anishinaabe teaching that the tree branches grow upwards like arms in awe of the Creator and life… I am becoming the grounded tree.”

We’re proud to introduce Ziibiwan’s Time Limits as the first release on RPM Records. Listen below.